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The Pirate Bay logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The High Court has passed judgement on The Pirate Bay, and will force the leading UK ISP's to block access to the site.

The Swedish website hosts links to download mostly pirated free music and video. Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media must all prevent their users from accessing the site. (BBC News)

There's no word yet on exactly what will be blocked. Is it just the URL? The IP address? A physical server? And what happens if a brand new site called 'TehPirateBay' pops up? Let's put aside the usual arguments around piracy, entitlement, inflated numbers, and propaganda, and think of what the ruling means for the Internet. Jim Killock, of the Open Rights Group:

Blocking the Pirate Bay is pointless and dangerous. It will fuel calls for further, wider and even more drastic calls for Internet censorship of many kinds, from pornography to extremism...

Given that The Pirate Bay holds no content itself, just the links to where you can find the content at other online destinations... when will Google be legally blocked? Yes, that's a great punch line, but in the eyes of the law, what has been banned is a search engine. If you follow today's ruling through to the end, then Google could easily be banned in the UK. And Bing. And Ask.com. And every other search engine, because they can link to copyrighted content.